Nevertheless, we lived on there in a meaningless sort of way—I hardly knew why. To me it was a puzzle. When I asked Hilda, she shook her head with her sibylline air and answered, confidently: “You do not understand Sebastian as well as I do. We have to wait for him. The next move is his. Till he plays his piece, I cannot tell how I may have to checkmate him.”
So we waited for Sebastian to advance a pawn. Meanwhile, I toyed with South African farming—not very successfully, I must admit. Nature did not design me for growing oats. I am no judge of oxen, and my views on the feeding of Kaffir sheep raised broad smiles on the black faces of my Mashona labourers.
I still lodged at Tant Mettie’s, as everybody called Mrs. Klaas; she was courtesy aunt to the community at large, while Oom Jan Willem was its courtesy uncle. They were simple, homely folk, who lived up to their religious principles on an unvaried diet of stewed ox-beef and bread; they suffered much from chronic dyspepsia, due in part, at least, no doubt, to the monotony of their food, their life, their interests. One could hardly believe one was still in the nineteenth century; these people had the calm, the local seclusion of the prehistoric epoch. For them, Europe did not exist; they knew it merely as a place where settlers came from. What the Czar intended, what the Kaiser designed, never disturbed their rest. A sick ox, a rattling tile on the roof, meant more to their lives than war in Europe. The one break in the sameness of their daily routine was family prayers; the one weekly event, going to church at Salisbury. Still, they had a single enthusiasm. Like everybody else for fifty miles around, they believed profoundly in the “future of Rhodesia.” When I gazed about me at the raw new land—the weary flat of red soil and brown grasses—I felt at least that, with a present like that, it had need of a future.
I am not by disposition a pioneer; I belong instinctively to the old civilisations. In the midst of rudimentary towns and incipient fields, I yearn for grey houses, a Norman church, an English thatched cottage.
However, for Hilda’s sake, I braved it out, and continued to learn the A B C of agriculture on an unmade farm with great assiduity from Oom Jan Willem.
We had been stopping some months at Klaas’s together when business compelled me one day to ride in to Salisbury. I had ordered some goods for my farm from England which had at last arrived. I had now to arrange for their conveyance from the town to my plot of land—a portentous matter. Just as I was on the point of leaving Klaas’s, and was tightening the saddle-girth on my sturdy little pony, Oom Jan Willem himself sidled up to me with a mysterious air, his broad face all wrinkled with anticipatory pleasure. He placed a sixpence in my palm, glancing about him on every side as he did so, like a conspirator.
“What am I to buy with it?” I asked, much puzzled, and suspecting tobacco. Tant Mettie declared he smoked too much for a church elder.
He put his finger to his lips, nodded, and peered round. “Lollipops for Sannie,” he whispered low, at last, with a guilty smile. “But”—he glanced about him again—“give them to me, please, when Tant Mettie isn’t looking.” His nod was all mystery.
“You may rely on my discretion,” I replied, throwing the time-honoured prejudices of the profession to the winds, and well pleased to aid and abet the simple-minded soul in his nefarious designs against little Sannie’s digestive apparatus. He patted me on the back. “Peppermint lollipops, mind!” he went on, in the same solemn undertone. “Sannie likes them best—peppermint.”
I put my foot in the stirrup, and vaulted into my saddle. “They shall not be forgotten,” I answered, with a quiet smile at this pretty little evidence of fatherly feeling. I rode off. It was early morning, before the heat of the day began. Hilda accompanied me part of the way on her bicycle. She was going to the other young farm, some eight miles off, across the red-brown plateau, where she gave lessons daily to the ten-year old daughter of an English settler. It was a labour of love; for settlers in Rhodesia cannot afford to pay for what are beautifully described as “finishing governesses”; but Hilda was of the sort who cannot eat the bread of idleness. She had to justify herself to her kind by finding some work to do which should vindicate her existence.